sermons
We Are Reservoir
Discovering the Love of God
Steve Watson
Sep 07, 2025
One of my favorite things on the internet this summer has been the animation of an artist named Christian Watson. He’s got an Instagram account that features his animations of skeletons with short musings on the meaning of life. And one of the recent ones shows a full sized skeleton reaching into the back seat of a car at night, scooping up a much smaller skeleton, and carrying it into a bed inside.
The words say:
I hope death feels like
Being picked up from the backseat
And carried to my bed half asleep
Where, tucked in and eyes closed,
I can hear those who love me talking through a cracked door.
I’ve watched this little animation dozens of times, many of them through tears, enough that I’ve been thinking about why it gets to me so much.
Some of it is being the father of kids who have grown up too fast. They were all home for a few weeks this summer, and one of them remembered out loud one day about the times he’d pretend to be asleep in the back seat when we got home, so that I’d scoop him up and carry him inside at night. I can’t scoop him up like that anymore, and he doesn’t fake sleep around me anymore either, but sometimes I wish I could get those days back you know.
Some of it is that things can be hard with my parents, but I have my own memories of my dad scooping me out of the back seat of the car like this, and I think: I want to hold on to that memory, because that was what love felt like.
And I think some of it is what Christian Watson had to say, about hoping death is like this. I’m a follower of Jesus and a Christian pastor, and I have my hopes and my faith in resurrection and life in the age to come and all, but I still find death pretty scary and sad sometimes. And I guess I hope death is like being scooped up in the arms of love and tucked in somewhere safe and warm too.
And some of what keeps me coming back to this image of the tender and watchful and strong arms of a parent scooping you up and bringing you somewhere safe, is that it gives me another image of what I think God must be like. An image that’s been helping me as I stay with it, and what I’d like to share more about with you today.
We’re starting our church year this fall as we usually do, with a little season we call We Are Reservoir, where we reflect a little bit about what it means to be part of this church together. Who we are and what we stand for, what it means to be a member here, and some of the opportunities and responsibilities we can embrace to make this the best church we can be.
Over the next three weeks, Pastors Lydia and Ivy and I are going to preach here about the three parts of our mission statement we say every week here on Sundays. And on the last Sunday of this month, we’ll worship all ages together to celebrate what belonging and contributing to this community can do for us all.
We start today with the first part of our mission, that says: We are here to inspire people to discover the love of God, or the love of Jesus. We say it both ways.
Let’s read a little, quirky love poem from the old Hebrew scriptures in the Bible, one that the prophet Isaiah puts in the mouth of God.
It goes like this:
Isaiah 46:1-7 (Common English Bible)
46 Bel crouches down; Nebo cowers.
Their idols sit on animals, on beasts.
The objects you once carried about
are now borne as burdens by the weary animals.
2 They crouch down and cower together.
They aren’t able to rescue the burden,
but they themselves go into captivity.
3 Listen to me, house of Jacob,
all that remains from the house of Israel
who have been borne by me since pregnancy,
whom I carried from the womb
4 until you grow old. I am the one,
and until you turn gray I will support you.
I have done it, and I will continue to bear it;
I will support and I will rescue.
5 To whom will you liken me and count me equal
and compare me so that we are alike?
6 Those who pour out gold from a bag
and weigh silver with a balance
hire a metalworker; then he makes a god.
They bow down; they worship;
7 they carry the idol on their shoulders and support it;
they set it down, and it stands still,
unable to move from its place.
If one cries out to it, it doesn’t answer.
It can’t save people from their distress.
There are more straightforward words of divine love in the Bible, like where Jeremiah has God saying:
I have loved you with an everlasting love.
Or when in the gospel of John, Jesus says:
As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you. Love each other as I have loved you.
But sometimes I like the weirder parts of the Bible, like this love poem that talks about ancient gods named Bel and Nebo and heavy idols, borne by weary pack animals.
These texts that read as odd to us, they help us remember that we’re guests in this story. Most of us are not from the Middle East, these lands where Africa, Asia, and Europe intersect and where all of the Bible is set. These texts deal with cultures not our own.
And none of us are ancient peoples. These texts come from times not our own.
We are participating in a faith that didn’t start with us, and I think that’s a healthy and humbling thing to remember.
Short version of what’s going on here is that Isaiah is imagining God gently mocking the bad habits these folks have picked up from their neighbors.
Bel and Nebo are Babylonian gods, the gods of the people who have until recently been oppressing the Jews who received this text. And it seems like in assimilating to the dominant culture, some of them have picked up a devotion to these gods, or at least to their idols.
Idols were always an offense to the ancient faith, which taught you couldn’t reduce Creator God to a statue or an image. But also that the only image bearers of God in creation aren’t statues, but us. Human beings, made in the image of God – God’s sacred, divine representatives on earth.
So the beef with idol worship was always that it’s an affront both to the glory of God and the glory of humans.
Isaiah takes the mocking here to another level, when he also adds that these idols do no good for you. You carry around these hunks of metal or wood, but they can’t speak to you and can’t help you. You just tired yourself and your animals out as you lug them around.
Again, for most of us, this probably seems like a very ancient and cross-cultural conversation, but I think about objects of devotion that my friends and I have invested myself in – wealth, success, people’s approval, an image of myself I’ve wanted to maintain, somebody else’s vision for what our life should be. And these too feel like objects of devotion that only wear us out.
Here the voice of God is to invite us to get free of these burdens, lay them down, and remember that God isn’t with us as a burden to be borne but as a burden-bearer. God invites us to remember, to imagine, that we are carried by God.
From our momma’s pregnancy to our gray-haired final days, God will support us, hold us, carry us. Like a parent who scoops their kid up from the backseat when sleeping or not, fake or real, we are just too tired to walk back home. God will bear us up again, help us find somewhere safe to lay our head again.
This is what God is like.
Here at church, we had our first fall staff meeting this past week. It’s always a long one. And we always start the day with some spiritual grounding and a chance to catch up with each other after the summer, when we’ve been together less often.
This year, a friend of mine, and a friend of this church, Keri Ladoceour, the executive director of the Post-Evangelical Collective, was in town, and I asked her if she’d lead this portion of our meeting.
And Keri just asked this question that our own pastor Ivy loves to ask as well:
How is your heart?
And she led us through some reflections on grief, gratitude, and growth.
It was intense, because there’s a lot to be grateful for in our lives, but there’s a lot to grieve as well. Which was sort of the point of the exercise, I suppose, that grief and gratitude together are the crucible of growth, because after all, grief and gratitude are a lot of what we’ve got in these lives.
And at one point, Keri shared that she used to imagine what the posture of God was like to her in grief, in hard places and hard things. Imagining that at some level, she believed God was loving and compassionate, but if she were to imagine a physical posture of God, it would be like this…
Folded arms, foot tapping. Frowning face. Waiting. Waiting for her to get it together. Waiting for her to get up and get moving. To be tough, independent, stronger.
I resonate with this. Maybe lots of us do. At least those of us who learned to be stoic and stuff our feelings down and carry on.
But what if that just isn’t true?
Most of our objects of devotion can’t help us in hard times. You might love your work, but your work will never love you back. Success won’t love you,
Money and security won’t answer you back. Someone else’s approval, someone else’s vision for your life can’t bear your burdens.
But the living God, creator of all things, father and mother to us all, will always love us. This God wants to support us through every season of life. And so Isaiah gives us this image of the God who will scoop us up and carry us, as a helpless baby, and as a gray-haired elder who can’t make the walk alone. God will carry us.
It’s not a physical, literal reality, it’s an image. If I lose myself in bed rot, just don’t get out of my bed for days, the Spirit of God is not going to physically levitate me to the kitchen to eat breakfast and then out of the house to go to work or go see a friend. I’ll need to do those things eventually.
But the gentle, inspiring posture of the Spirit of God is not going to be standing there, arms crossed, judging frown upon the face, criticizing me until I get myself together.
No, the Spirit of God is going to be more like my childhood memory, stirred by that skeleton on the internet, of a parent scooping up the tired kid out of the backseat, and helping him find his way back home.
A really pragmatic person might wonder why this even matters. If faith in God won’t literally, physically rescue us from all our problems and carry us away into a grief-free life of constant bliss, how is it different than any other object of our devotion?
Well, I think it matters in a lot of ways, but one of them is that it changes us. It changes the center of our world.
When my posture of God is mostly the impatient, frowning, disapproving parent, the center of my life is feeling kind of crappy about myself. Like I’m just unsuccessfully trying to fend off failure at every turn.
Years ago, I noticed that when I wanted to talk to God, I’d most often start off by saying sorry. Oh, sorry, God, that once again I … fill in the blank … whatever stupid mistakes or habits or failures I hated myself for.
And maybe that’s a particularly dysfunctional religious posture that a lot of us developed, but I look around our times, and well outside the world of religion, I feel like we struggle with healthy centers of ourselves.
The chronic and persistent anxiety and depression and meaninglessness that so many of us, and so many of our younger people in particular, are experiencing these days speaks to a lot of things, but in part it speaks to the struggle to grow into a strong, supportive, resilient center to ourselves.
Like at our center, we are sad or pointless or just not good enough.
But what if our center could grow into what it was made to be – sacred image of God, beloved child of God that God is so glad to carry?
To know that by myself I was never meant to be all that I need, but with the help of God and friends, I can be. Because that is the truest truth of my life. That I am loved. It was the first thing that was true about me before anything else, that I was loved. And it will stay true my whole life, all of my days, until I’m old and gray, that I am loved. And it will stay true long after this life passes away. I will always be loved.
That’s a strong center. That’s a center that can grow in this grief and gratitude-filled lives of ours.
My friend Mariama, also another friend of this church, said recently this really wise thing. She said:
we’re learning how almost all our resources run out. We can’t just keep mining and drilling and consuming our way forward. But there are two things that can grow endlessly, that can continue to grow without any limit. And those are love, and fear.
There’s almost no limit to how big fear and love can grow. They are both powerful forces that change our inner life, and that change everyone and everything around us. So true. Both unchecked fear and unguarded love bring new worlds into being. But only one of them is good.
And just as perfect love can cast out fear, sometimes perfect fear can also cast out love.
Sadly, this world gives us lots of reasons to be afraid.
So what’s going to give us reasons to love?
Having a center that knows I was loved first is going to help. Having a center that knows the first and truest thing about us all is we are loved is going to help.
Friends, I leave you today with two encouragements.
- One is to imaginative prayer.
- The other is a lens to try to see other people through this week.
Imaginative prayer is reading the images of the Bible the way I’ve tried to for us today. Like when it says:
Listen to me …. who have been borne by me since pregnancy,
whom I carried from the womb
4 until you grow old. I am the one,
and until you turn gray I will support you.
I have done it, and I will continue to bear it;
I will support and I will rescue.
And to imagine it’s so. Imagine at various moments of your life, past and present, that God is working to carry, support, and rescue you.
- How has God done that?
- How might God do it again?
For me, this image of a parent scooping the kid out of the backseat is an image that takes me there, that like my dad was for me in these moments, and like I was for my kids, God is there for me with strength and tender support when I’m out of energy and out of moves and just can’t find my way back home.
And this image of being carried helps take me to that truth.
That particular image might not work for all of you. So find another one that does. Thankfully, the Bible, and our artists, and even memes on the internet are full of beautiful and true images that show us what love is like. Set your imagination on that. Think about these things.
And secondly, I encourage you to try an experiment for a day or for a week, or however long you can sustain it. Try to namaste yourself through a week, or even a day.
I don’t mean you literally have to go around greeting everyone, Namaste. I think it’s kind of weird when people who aren’t South Asian or aren’t in a yoga studio go around doing that.
But that word “Namaste” literally in Sanskrit means: I bow to you.
And over the years, a spirituality has developed around that says: The sacred in me honors the sacred in you. So I bow to you. And yeah, this spirituality is first a Hindu one, but it’s a profoundly Jesus sentiment as well. So for the many Christians in the room, it is a spiritual posture we can happily adopt as well.
To think of us all as divine image-bearers. Ourselves, our family, our friends, our strangers, even our enemies – all beloved, all made in the image of God. So that our posture toward one another is to think: the image of God in me greets the image of God in you.
Try relating to the people of the world for a while, and see what that does for you.